Aug
31
2009
0

Monday morning updates

With over 80 items on my LabourStart and UnionBook to-do lists, I’m trying to do as many as possible this week and today will list them as I cross them off the list.  As a result, this entry will cover a number of different areas.  Here goes:

  • Hindi & Bengali editions: Sent the file to Mahesh that needs to be translated in order to launch these.
  • Recruiting new correspondents: Wrote to all 2,000 members of our Facebook group inviting them to sign up.
  • Radio LabourStart: Wrote to Derek about relaunching this using podcasts.
  • Work with ILCA: Wrote to Mariya Strauss about ways we can work together, including participation in each others’ conferences and ILCA members becoming LabourStart correspondents.
  • Portuguese edition: Wrote to our 4 correspondents (2 in Brazil, 2 in Portugal) asking for their help to revive this and to recruit new correspondents.
  • Multilingual campaigns: Wrote to our translators in Spanish, Dutch and Italian to ask for their preferred logins so that they can update campaigns directly without emailing me.   This will speed up campaign launches.
Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Aug
30
2009
0

Twitter

Considering that it’s August, a gain of 266 new followers on Twitter in the last few days is excellent news — it’s a more than 20% increase.  We’ll remind people of this from time to time, and in the fall should see further increases.  If we pick up another 350 followers, we’ll have overtaken even the AFL-CIO, which appears to be the most popular of the union Twitterers (though I haven’t done an exhaustive investigation).

Oh, and we’re no longer in the top 35,000 Twitterers — we’re now in the top 28,000, having jumped over 7,000 others in the last few days.  To make the top 1,000 Twitterers we’d need about 43,000 followers, so that’s not going to happen any time soon.  And to put things in perspective, there are already 99 Twitterers with a million followers or more apiece.

Written by ericlee in: Twitter |
Aug
27
2009
3

New UK edition launched

LabourStart’s UK news page — which was actually the very first one we created, a decade ago — has been relaunched on the model of the Australian, Canadian and US pages, and can be reached at any of the following URLs:

  • http://www.labourstart.org.uk
  • http://www.labourstart.org/uk
  • http://uk.labourstart.org

In addition, I’ve fixed this and the other three editions to include a fairly prominent link back to global labour news (http://www.labourstart.org).

Written by ericlee in: Internationalization,News database |
Aug
27
2009
4

Posterous

LabourStart senior correspondent Oskar van Rijswijk (Netherlands) often comes up with the coolest tools.  He found Twitter for us, for example.  More recently, he strongly recommended that we check out Posterous.  I’ve had some time today to check this out and can see that even with the first few steps, we’ve got a solution to several problems.

Here’s what I’ve done:

  1. I added the Posterous email address to our English language mailing list.  (That took about a second.)
  2. Then I sent out three test messages to Posterous by email – including our two most recent posts to our mailing list.
  3. All 3 were automatically posted to our LabourStart Posterous web page, which means that this becomes an easy-to-find repository of our mailings, both for archival use and for our translators.
  4. In addition, all 3 were automatically routed as Tweets — initially to my own Twitter account, but in future, to LabourStart’s.

We have the potential to do more — such as posting to Facebook, Flickr, blogs, etc.

At the moment, there’s no additional work needed — every mass mailing we do from now on gets routed through Posterous, appears on our blog there, and is Tweeted.

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Aug
27
2009
0

Twitter update – good news and bad

The good news first:  In the last 24 hours, we picked up 220 new followers to our Twitter feed thanks to our mass mailing.  This is a fairly low response (220 out of 58,000), but many of our readers don’t use Twitter, or have already become followers, and it is, after all, August.  Overall our follower base grew by nearly 20% in one day, which is great.

The bad news: The service feeding our new information to Twitter (Twitterfeed) seems to be erratic.  We’ll need to look into why it doesn’t always update in real time.  We may need to consider going manual for a while.

Written by derek in: Twitter |
Aug
26
2009
1

Draft campaign guidelines

As we discussed at our 2008 and 2009 conferences, LabourStart needs a set of simple guidelines (rules) that determine whether we accept a campaign or not.  What follows is my suggestion.  I welcome your response (use the comments) and intend to publish this in another two weeks (on 9 September) unless there’s a very strong objection raised.  Here goes [text updated 1.9.09]:

LabourStart runs online campaigns at the request of trade unions around the world.  Our preference is for campaigns to be submitted by global union federations, national trade union centres and national unions, but will in some circumstances accept campaigns from local and branch unions.  We do not normally accept campaigns submitted by individuals or NGOs which are not unions.  Campaigns which would benefit from global exposure and support are more likely to be approved than campaigns that will be of no interest outside of your locality or country.  Our campaigns run for three months and if the issues are not resolved by then, LabourStart reserves the right to suspend the campaign.  Unions which request campaigns from us are expected to keep us updated and to promote the campaign to their own members and others.  We never charge unions for running these campaigns and the service will always be free.

Written by derek in: Campaigns |
Aug
26
2009
0

2 campaigns closed

With the permission of the IMF and WAC, we’ve now closed down the campaigns in support of the Sinter workers in Turkey and the IAA workers in Israel.  WAC has promised us a full report which we can share with our readers.  Both disputes continue, unfortunately.

Written by derek in: Campaigns |
Aug
26
2009
0

Twittermania

Having used Twitter on an iPod Touch for several weeks now, I can see how this can be seen as the fastest way of getting information out — especially useful for campaigns and breaking news.  Which is why I devoted today’s mailing to LabourStart’s list in English to Twitter.  Basically, I want our list of Twitter followers to grow, and to grow very quickly.  It’s taken us nearly 9 months to double in size, but I think with this mailing, we may see a big surge in new signups.  Here is how our Twitter following has grown over the last year:

26 August 2009 1,200
1 July 2009 1,127
15 May 2009: 1,000
13 May 2009: 992
27 March 2009: 834
26 November 2008: 593
25 October 2008: 575

By way of comparison, here are some current numbers of Twitter followers (as of 26 August 2009):

  • AFL-CIO (USA) 1,815
  • LabourStart (Global) 1,200
  • UNISON (UK) 881
  • DGB (Germany) 588
  • IG Metall (Germany) 225
  • UNI (Global) 220
  • CFDT (France) 157
  • Education International (Global) 54
  • ITUC (Global) 46
  • ITF (Global) 16

One last thing — according to Twitterholic, we make the top 35,000 Twitterers.  That’s not good enough.

Written by derek in: Uncategorized |
Aug
26
2009
2

LabourStart to publish a book

This a draft outline prepared by Derek Blackadder for a book which we aim to get published sometime in the next year — it will be jointly authored by a number of us, and Derek, working together with Art Shostak and others, will be editing and coordinating this project.

(more…)

Written by derek in: Uncategorized |
Aug
25
2009
0

Old campaigns

Of the seven campaigns currently featured on our home page, four of them are more than three months old.  I’ve written this morning to those who requested the campaigns – in Turkey, Israel, Puerto Rico and Algeria – to ask for permission to close them down.

A reminder why we do this:

  • The number of messages sent after the first few days slows down to a trickle, and an employer or government will certainly notice that no one seems to be interested any longer in the campaign.
  • Our own readers expect to see fresh campaigns — not long forgotten ones (in some cases, disputes which are already over).
  • And — as you can see from the posting regarding the Sappi dispute below — it is hugely important to update our readers on results, and one way to produce such an update is to end a campaign and get a report from the union on what happened.

For those reasons and more, it will be rare indeed that we allow a campaign to drag on beyond three months, but we never close them down without first talking to the sponsoring union.

Written by derek in: Campaigns |

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